by Ed Diener
To understand happiness in a scientific way, we first need valid measures. Second, we need broad and large representative samples of people so that our conclusions are not based only on our acquaintances or people who stand out in our memories. Third, we can't rely solely on surveys; we need to use experiments and studies over time to truly understand what leads to happiness, and what happiness in turn causes. There is nothing mysterious about science - it is using rigorous methods to obtain the best information that is available. We have been building the science of happiness for several decades, and the reader will see that we have learned some important things that were hitherto unknown.
The science of happiness is new, and there is much we don't yet know. We have one important warning for readers of this book: the findings we describe are based on group averages, and don't necessarily apply to all individuals. For instance, even if we find that marriage leads people to be happier, this is the average reaction, and some individuals will nevertheless be made unhappy by marriage. The science of happiness is not at the stage where we can tell to which individuals our generalizations will apply. Thus, when you read that rich, religious, and sociable people tend to be happier, remember that this is based on averages, and may or may not apply to you. Therefore, although a science of happiness is rapidly developing, the ability to apply these findings to individual lives is still largely an art.
Some findings from the field based on early studies (for example, that lottery winners are not significantly happier than others) have been overturned by later research (two studies have found that lottery winners are happier). Our own views have changed over time. A hallmark of science is that answers are provisional until better studies are conducted, and we realize that some of our conclusions are likely to be overturned. At the same time, we believe that the findings in this book represent the best understanding of happiness that currently exists. We are optimistic that just as science transformed our material world in the twentieth century, it can revolutionize our understanding of happiness in the twenty-first century.
The Components of Complete Happiness
Take a moment and consider happiness in your own life. Think of a time, perhaps recently or perhaps long ago, that you felt very happy. Maybe it was the day you received the job offer from your first employer. Maybe it was the first day of warm weather after a long cold winter. Perhaps it was last weekend, when you took your daughter to the park and napped on the sofa afterward. Without question, a variety of circumstances and events can make you happy. And even the experience of happiness itself can vary from time to time. That job offer was probably exciting, while the warm weather might have been emotionally refreshing, and the quiet Saturday probably left you feeling content. Each of these states suggests a different facet of happiness.
When it comes to the sticky definition of happiness, we realized early on that people have all sorts of idiosyncratic ideas about happiness, and that they could argue forever about which definition of happiness is the real one. We solved the issue by thinking about happiness as "subjective well-being." That is, we view happiness as a subjective state, defined by the individual. In happy states, we believe that our lives and current events are going well. Happiness includes all of the pleasant emotions - ranging from joy, to affection, to gratitude - that we experience as positive and pleasant. Therefore, when we investigate happiness, we are interested in the full range of people's pleasant moods and emotions. We ask about harmony and peace, enthusiasm and joy, pride and contentment, and don't try to argue that one of them is "not happiness." By taking a wide view of happiness, we stay flexible enough to account for individual variation in the experience of happiness and how individuals define it.
Where do negative or unpleasant emotions fit in our definition of happiness? Let's be realistic. The emotional part of happiness is not about a permanent, intense emotional glow that never fades. Even the most upbeat people have down days and experience problems. In fact, most of us would treat a person who claimed to be perfectly happy all the time with suspicion. Negative emotions, such as guilt and worry, can be useful at times. We need to feel them in order to function effectively. Imagine a society in which we did not feel guilt when we behaved poorly or disappointment when we failed to achieve a goal. It would be terrible. Indeed, unpleasant feelings provide us useful feedback about the quality of our lives, as well as motivating us to make changes. Happiness, then, allows for a small dose of negative feelings while we are frequently experiencing positive ones. The balance, however, should heavily tilt in favor of the pleasant emotions.
Happiness is more than simply an emotion; it is a broad psychological state of which emotions are only one part. There is also a "cognitive," or thinking, component to well-being. People tend to stand back and evaluate their lives - judging how they are doing - and we call this type of happiness "life satisfaction." This component of well-being consists of people evaluating how well they are doing in life and the domains that are important to them. In measuring life satisfaction, we leave the exact standards for happiness up to the individual. One person, for example, might be overjoyed with an income of $40,000 a year, while another would be panicked by that same amount. Allowing each individual to gauge the quality of her own life paves the way for tapping people's unique experiences and values.
In addition to being satisfied with life in general, a person's satisfaction with important domains is also needed for consummate happiness. A person should not only be satisfied with life, but positive about important areas, such as health, work, relationships, and leisure. In addition, a person should feel good about himself or herself, as well as feeling competent and respected. These positive evaluations of important aspects of life have been called "flourishing" because they suggest that the person is doing well across the core aspects of human functioning.
Feeling Good, but for the Right Reasons
Would you accept permanent happiness if it meant giving up actual work, relationships, and even pain? What would you choose? Would you sacrifice the ups and downs of life and give up your job, friends, and family, if it meant guaranteed happiness? These questions were asked in a thought experiment by the late philosopher Robert Nozick. He proposed the idea of an "experiencing machine," in which your brain could be hooked to a computer. Imagine that the experience machine would inject your thinking and feeling organ with just the right combination of dopamine, opiates, and serotonin so that you would feel permanently blissful, and the computer would project images into your brain so that you believed you were winning awards, going to your child's choir concert, and making love to your spouse. But there is a catch. As a brain hooked up to a computer, you would no longer work, have relationships, or experience the hardships of life, such as parking tickets and computer crashes. You would be perfectly happy.
We have presented this question to thousands of students in classes we have taught. In our experience, about 95 percent of the students opt for work, social connections, and pain over orgasmic bliss. The other 5 percent prefer the easy route. Perhaps their jobs and families are not that rewarding. Perhaps they don't fully realize what they would be giving up. Although we can't be certain what people would choose if actually faced with an experiencing machine, our results underscore Nozick's basic assertion: people generally want to be happy, but for the right reasons. Most people would prefer to live according to a clearly held sense of values. They are willing to accept some anxiety and disappointment en route to the deep satisfaction of an important personal achievement. It may even be that a little hardship and effort makes the payoff more rewarding.
The founder of positive psychology, Martin E. P. Seligman, has pointed to the distinction between pleasurable happiness and happiness based on meaning and purpose in life. For people with a genetic predisposition toward negativity, this will come as welcome news, because engagement and meaning are possible even when pleasant feelings are low. Conversely, it is possible to experience many pleasant feelings without feeling happy in the
life-satisfaction sense of the word. Playing computer games, eating ice cream, and singing a catchy song may all be pleasurable activities, but they are often not linked to a deeper sense of life satisfaction. Happiness is a matter of balance. Too much pleasure without purpose can be destructive. Hedonism without pursuing meaning leaves most people feeling empty. However, too much purpose without actually feeling good leaves something to be desired as well. Consummate happiness includes both pleasure and meaning.
Consummate Happiness
A person with high subjective well-being is someone who experiences a preponderance of joy and affection (positive affect) along with only occasional guilt, worry, anger, and sadness (negative affect), feels satisfied with her life (life satisfaction), and with important aspects of it. To put this into a formula, subjective well-being = positive affect - negative affect + life satisfaction + flourishing.
By looking at both pleasant and unpleasant moods, as well as broad and domain-specific satisfaction, we have a definition of happiness that works for most people. We allow for personal variation in definitions of happiness; for example, some people emphasize contentment while others focus on joy. Such variation is relatively small, however, when compared to what people have in common where happiness is concerned. Think about it: whatever definition of happiness you prefer, all humans share a basic biology that determines that certain emotions - joy, contentment, curiosity, affection, and hope - will feel pleasant. We have yet to come across a culture in which people experience crippling depression as pleasant, or think that cultivating lasting hatred is the emotional ideal. In the end, happiness - however the word is used - refers to a set of feelings that are pleasant, and the evaluation the person makes that his or her life is going well.
There are sometimes conflicts and trade-offs between types of happiness. In fact, people sometimes sacrifice one element of happiness for another. People commonly turn down offers to participate in emotionally rewarding activities in the present so that they can continue to work toward goals that will reap larger psychological rewards in the future. You might pass on a dinner date, for example, in favor of working on a campaign to raise money for a local literacy program. There is also a trade-off between aspects of happiness as we get older. As we age, we tend to experience emotions less intensely. The burning passions of our twenties subside into the warm embers of our seventies. But this is not to say that the elderly are unhappy - not by a long shot. In fact, research shows that older people are often higher than younger folks in life satisfaction, even while younger people tend to be higher in the experience of intense pleasant emotions.
Scientifically Measuring Happiness
When Ed began his studies of happiness, he focused his early work on measurement. He developed a new scale for assessing life satisfaction, but his biggest focus was testing whether scales to measure happiness are truly valid. What he discovered is that happiness can be measured in many different ways, not just through surveys.
Some researchers get at the questions of happiness through biological tallies of feelings. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, uses brain imaging to measure the cerebral activity of happy people. He has made strides in identifying brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, that are associated with happiness. To oversimplify, Davidson finds that more activity in the very front of the left side of the brain, right behind your left eyebrow, shows more in happy people, whereas depressed people have more activity in their brains right behind their right eyebrow.
One of Davidson's most highly publicized investigations revolves around the emotions of Buddhist monks versus those of university students. Davidson placed his research subjects in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and asked them to voluntarily generate emotional compassion at specific intervals. The monks, who had years of experience with meditation, were able to make the machine spike on cue, while the hapless university students could hardly nudge their electronic readings. Apparently, we can generate positive emotional feelings if we are highly practiced at it.
Another biological psychologist, the University of Chicago researcher John Cacioppo, uses electrodes to measure tiny movements in facial muscles associated with various emotions. He shows his participants pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant slides. The images show things like ice cream cones, snakes, chairs, and horrific physical deformities. Cacioppo measures the intensity of the reactions to these photographs, and has found interesting differences between happy individuals and their more distressed counterparts. For instance, dispositionally happy people react to neutral stimuli, such as a chair, as if it were positive. That tells us something very interesting about happy people, and how they approach the world. More specifically, it tells us that in the absence of any perceived threats, happy people are more likely to see the normal environment in a positive way, a tendency that Cacioppo links to evolutionary survival.
Yet another biological approach to measuring happiness is through measuring hormones circulating in the blood and in the brain. For instance, levels of dopamine and serotonin circulating in certain regions of the brain are connected to feelings related to happiness. As you probably know, recent antidepressant drugs work by influencing the levels of natural hormones, such as serotonin, that remain active in the brain. It is easier to assess hormones circulating in the bloodstream, of course, because only a pinprick is required, rather than a needle probe through the skull. Megan Gunnar is one of the world's foremost experts on cortisol, a hormone circulating in the bloodstream that readies our bodies for action, but which can also signify stress. By tracking the rise and fall of cortisol through the day, she tracks our stress reactions in everyday life through biological means.
But biological measures are not the only methods to gauge happiness. Despite the sophistication of the biological measures of happiness, simply asking people how happy they are is still the most frequent way we measure well-being. People tend to be skilled at monitoring their own emotions, and generally know how intensely they are experiencing happiness. Just consider yourself for a moment: if we asked you how happy you are right now, you would probably know whether you are flying high or are down in the dumps. Not only can you distinguish between these two extremes, but you likely also know if you are moderately happy or very happy. If we asked you whether you were generally satisfied with your job, you could likely tell us the specific aspects you are pleased with and those about which you have some complaints. In fact, self-reports of happiness correlate with the biological measures, suggesting that asking folks about their happiness is a valid route to measuring this experience.
But what about people who might be shy about saying they are happy, or are motivated to conceal their discontent? What of people who are currently in a happy mood, and so summarize their entire life as very happy? We recognize these and other problems when measuring happiness, and overcome them by employing other measures in addition to self-report. For instance, we try to obtain the reports of friends and family members, people who know the research participant well and are willing to report on his or her moods. If you think about those folks you are close to - your spouse or your best friend - it is almost certain that you know when they are feeling upbeat and when they are a bit sour. They just can't hide the truth behind their moods day in and day out. We use these "informant reports" to look for agreement or discrepancies in the happiness scores of our research participants.
In addition to informant reports, we use memory measures of good and bad events that have occurred in the recent past. Happy people tend to be able to quickly recall lots of positive events, such as their child's school play, walking the dog, a productive brainstorming session at work, or the clever thing they said at a party. Depressed people, because they have a habit of focusing on the negatives of life, can easily recall recent problems, upsets, failures, and setbacks. Therefore, when we ask research participants to list as many positive or negative events as they can remember in a short period of time, such as sixty se
conds, we can see whether or not they lean toward happiness. The renowned Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Talya Miron-Schatz have used the listing of daily thoughts, coded into positive and negative categories, as yet another way to assess happiness.
But we don't stop with measures of biology, self-report, informant report, thought listing, and memory. We also commonly use the experience sampling method (ESM), in which we provide research participants with a palmtop computer that periodically rings a random alarm, and ask them to fill out mood reports throughout the day while they are engaged in a wide range of natural situations. The participants report their mood on the palmtop at random moments in the mornings and the afternoons, when they are alone and with friends, and when they are at work and at weekends. In this way, we are able to sample people's moods from moment to moment as they go about their lives in the real world. Although people's momentary moods tend to fluctuate a bit, owing to momentary situational factors, a person's average moods are usually consistent when calculated over time. A happy person goes up and down in moods, but over time she tends to have a higher average mood level than an unhappy person. Thus, the ESM measure is one of the best ways of assessing happiness.
However, ESM has a few costs as well, especially to us researchers. We have lost several expensive palmtops over the years. They occasionally get left in trains, dropped in toilets (we asked that volunteer not to return that computer), and crushed by cars. But the information ESM provides is invaluable. Finally, we can explore measures of how much people smile or frown, for example, in a videotaped interview, as a measure of happiness. Taken together, all these measures can paint a reasonably accurate picture of a person's overall happiness. As it turns out, psychologists can measure happiness about as well as economists can measure income - pretty well, but not perfectly. When several measures of happiness are used together, we can obtain a reasonably accurate measure of happiness.
